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vibssingh

How to run Chrome tests in headless mode in Selenium

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This tutorial explains the steps to run the Selenium tests for Chrome browser in headless mode. We are going to run the tests in Selenium 4 as well as Selenium 3.

What is headless browser?

A headless browser is like any other browser, but without a Head/GUI (Graphical User Interface).  A headless browser is used to automate the browser without launching the browser. While the tests are running, we could not see the browser, but we can see the test results coming on the console.

Headless browser testing is generally faster when compared to actual UI testing as it doesn’t wait for the whole page to render before performing any action.

When we need to execute automated test cases remotely on a server or in any of the build and release pipelines for continuous integration servers like Gitlab or Jenkins, it is not always possible to install real browsers on such remote machines. We can use headless browsers to run automation tests efficiently.

It is easy to perform multi-tasking with a Headless browser. The browser or our machine can do anything else while the tests run in the background.

There are 2 ways to add dependencies to the Selenium project.

1. Manually add the dependencies to the project.

Download Selenium Version from here (Selenium 3 & Selenium 4)

Download ChromeDriver Binary (Selenium 3 only)

Download the latest version of WebDriverManager (Selenium 3 only)

Once the Selenium and WebDriverManager folders are downloaded, unzip the folder. Once the zip file is extracted, reference these jar files in the project. For this, navigate to project properties and click Build Path-> Configure Build Path in Eclipse. Click “Add External Jars“. After clicking on the “Add External JARs“, selected all the extracted JARs. The JARs files are present in the project.

2. Add the below dependencies to pom.xml or build.gradle.

Selenium 4

Add below dependencies to the project.

 <dependency>
      <groupId>org.seleniumhq.selenium</groupId>
      <artifactId>selenium-java</artifactId>
      <version>4.16.1</version>
 </dependency>

The complete program looks like as shown below:

package com.example.steps;

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeOptions;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxOptions;

public class ChromeOptionsHeadless_Demo {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        // Create an object of Chrome Options class
        ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();

        // Set Firefox Headless mode as TRUE
        options.addArguments("--headless=new");

        // Create an object of WebDriver class and pass the Chrome Options object
        // as an argument
        WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(options);

        // Navigate to site url
        driver.get("https://duckduckgo.com/");

        System.out.println("Executing Chrome Driver in Headless mode..");
        System.out.println("Page Title : " + driver.getTitle());
        System.out.println("Page URL  : " + driver.getCurrentUrl());

        // Close the driver
        driver.quit();
    }

}

The output of the above program is

Selenium 3

Add below dependencies to the project.

 <dependency>
      <groupId>org.seleniumhq.selenium</groupId>
      <artifactId>selenium-java</artifactId>
      <version>3.141.59</version>
 </dependency>

We know that to execute Selenium automation scripts on browsers like chrome or firefox, we must download the binary files of these drivers like chromedriver and geckodriver, etc. After this, we need to set the path to these binaries in the automation script or add the classpath location. Here, we want to execute Selenium WebDriver automation scripts on the Chrome browser, then you need first to download chromedriver.exe and then use the System.setProperty  method to set its path as follows:

	// Set the path of ChromeDriver
	System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver",
				"C:\\Users\\Vibha\\Software\\chromedriver_win32_98.0.4758.102\\chromedriver.exe");

The complete program looks like as shown below:

import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeOptions;

public class ChromeOptionsHeadless1 {

	public static void main(String[] args) {

		// Set the path of ChromeDriver
		System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver",
				"C:\\Users\\Vibha\\Software\\chromedriver_win32_98.0.4758.102\\chromedriver.exe");

		// Create an object of Chrome Options class
		ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();

		// pass the argument –headless to Chrome Options class.
		options.addArguments("--headless");

		// Create an object of Chrome Driver class and pass the Chrome Options object as
		// an argument
		ChromeDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(options);

		System.out.println("Executing Chrome Driver in Headless mode..");
		driver.get("https://duckduckgo.com/");

		System.out.println("Title of Page :" + driver.getTitle());
		System.out.println("Page URL  : " + driver.getCurrentUrl());

		// Close the driver
		driver.close();

	}
}

The output of the above program is

How to run headless Chrome Tests in Selenium using WebDriverManager?

WebDriverManager

<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/io.github.bonigarcia/webdrivermanager -->
<dependency>
    <groupId>io.github.bonigarcia</groupId>
    <artifactId>webdrivermanager</artifactId>
    <version>5.1.0</version>
</dependency>

WebDriverManager has an automated way to download browser executables(exes) or binaries. It supports different browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, Opera, or PhantomJS.

WebDriverManager.chromedriver().setup: checks for the latest version of the specified WebDriver binary. If the binaries are not present on the machine, then it will download the WebDriver binaries. Next, it instantiates the Selenium WebDriver instance with the ChromeDriver.

import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeOptions;

import io.github.bonigarcia.wdm.WebDriverManager;

public class ChromeOptionsHeadless2 {

	public static void main(String[] args) {

		// WebDriverManager downloads chrome browser executables or binaries.
		WebDriverManager.chromedriver().setup();

		// Create an object of Chrome Options class
		ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();

		// pass the argument –headless to Chrome Options class.
		options.addArguments("--headless");

		// Create an object of Chrome Driver class and pass the Chrome Options object as
		// an argument
		ChromeDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(options);

		System.out.println("Executing Chrome Driver in Headless mode..");
		driver.get("https://duckduckgo.com/");

		System.out.println("Title of Page :" + driver.getTitle());
		System.out.println("Page URL  : " + driver.getCurrentUrl());

		// Close the driver
		driver.close();

	}

}

The output of the above program is

Congratulations!! We are able to run Chrome tests in Selenium in headless mode.

vibssingh

How to run Chrome tests in headless mode in Selenium4

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This tutorial explains the steps to run the Selenium tests in Chrome browser in headless mode. We are going to run the tests in Selenium 4.

Add the below dependencies to pom.xml or build.gradle.

Add the below dependencies to the project. I have added the Junit dependency because I want to add an assertion and create a test method.

<dependency>
            <groupId>org.seleniumhq.selenium</groupId>
            <artifactId>selenium-java</artifactId>
            <version>4.9.1</version>
 </dependency>

 <dependency>
            <groupId>org.junit.jupiter</groupId>
            <artifactId>junit-jupiter-engine</artifactId>
            <version>5.9.2</version>
            <scope>test</scope>
 </dependency>

What is a headless browser?

A headless browser is like any other browser but without a Head/GUI (Graphical User Interface).  A headless browser is used to automate the browser without launching the browser. While the tests are running, we could not see the browser, but we can see the test results coming on the console.

Headless browser testing is generally faster when compared to actual UI testing as it doesn’t wait for the whole page to render before performing any action.

The traditional way is to add –headless, and since version 96, Chrome has a new headless mode that allows users to get the full browser functionality (even run extensions). Between versions 96 to 108 it was  –headless=chrome, after version 109, it is –headless=new.

The complete program looks like as shown below:

import org.junit.jupiter.api.Assertions;
import org.junit.jupiter.api.Test;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeOptions;

public class HeadlessChrome_Demo {

    public ChromeDriver driver;

    @Test
    public void test() {

        // Create an object of Chrome Options class
        ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();

        // pass the argument -–headless and maximize to Chrome Options class.
        options.addArguments("--start-maximize");
        options.addArguments("--headless=new");

        // Create an object of Chrome Driver class and pass the Chrome Options object as
        // an argument
        driver = new ChromeDriver(options);

        System.out.println("Executing Chrome Driver in Headless mode..");
        driver.get("https://duckduckgo.com/");

        String titlePage = driver.getTitle();
        System.out.println("Title of Page :" + titlePage);
        Assertions.assertEquals("DuckDuckGo — Privacy, simplified.",titlePage);
        
        // Close the driver
        driver.close();

    }

}

The output of the above program is

Congratulations!! We are able to run Chrome tests in Selenium in headless mode.

vibssingh

How to run Serenity BDD tests in Chrome Browser

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Serenity BDD has strong WebDriver integration and manages WebDriver instances. It is not needed to create or close the WebDriver instance of the Serenity Tests.

Serenity uses a library WebDriver Manager, which manages the driver for us. We don’t need to explicitly download and configure the WebDriver binaries for us.

The default browser of Serenity is Firefox. 

    @Managed(driver = "chrome")
    WebDriver driver;

@Managed annotation in Serenity will manage the WebDriver instance, including opening the appropriate driver at the start of each test, and shutting it down when the test is finished. @Managed provides an option for the user to select the WebDriver driver to the run the tests in it. The possible values are firefox, chrome, iexplorer, phantomjs, appium, safari, edge, and htmlunit. There are multiple ways to manage the WebDriver. One of the way is shown below:

In the below program, the tests are running on the Chrome browser. The driver name is mentioned with @Managed annotation. 

@RunWith(SerenityRunner.class)
public class ChromeTest {

    @Managed(driver = "chrome")
    WebDriver driver;

    @Steps
    NavigateActions navigate;

    @Test
    public void openBrowser()
    {
        navigate.toTheHomePage();
    }

}

NavigateActions

public class NavigateActions extends UIInteractionSteps {

    @Step
    public void toTheHomePage() {
         openUrl("https://opensource-demo.orangehrmlive.com/");
    }
}

There is another way to assign Chrome to the WebDriver. This can be defined in serenity.config or serenity.properties.

serenity.config

webdriver{
    driver = chrome

}

serenity.properties

webdriver.driver = chrome

When the webdriver is defined in the properties file, it is not needed to redefine it in the Test, as shown below:

@RunWith(SerenityRunner.class)
public class ChromeTest {

    @Managed
    WebDriver driver;

    @Steps
    NavigateActions navigate;

    @Test
    public void openBrowser()
    {
        navigate.toTheHomePage();
    }

}

Manually Configure ChromeDriver

To run your web tests with a given driver, download the correct driver binary and place it under src/test resources. The Chrome driver binary can be downloaded from here – ChromeDriver – WebDriver for Chrome (chromium.org)

It is always advisable to create a driver’s directory under src/test/resources. The tests can be run on different Operating Systems, so create three subdirectories named Windows, mac, and Linux within the drivers’ directory. Place the driver binary in these directories as shown below :

Below is the sample Serenity.config for the Chrome driver.

webdriver{
    driver = chrome

}

drivers {
  windows {
     webdriver.chrome.driver = "src/test/resources/drivers/windows/chromedriver.exe"
   }
  mac {
      webdriver.chrome.driver = "src/test/resources/webdriver/mac/chromedriver.exe"
    }
    linux {
      webdriver.chrome.driver = "src/test/resources/webdriver/linux/chromedriver.exe"
    }
  }
}

How to add Chrome Options in Serenity

We can configure various chrome options in Serenity by adding them to a property call switches in serenity.config.

chrome {
        switches ="""--windows.size=1024,800, --start-maximized;--test-type;--no-sandbox;--ignore- 
                             certificate-errors; --headless;
                   --disable-popup-blocking;--disable-default-apps;--disable-extensions-file-access-check;
                   --incognito;--disable-infobars,--disable-gpu"""
  }

How to set Chrome Preferences in Serenity

chrome {
  switches ="""--windows.size=1024,800, --start-maximized;--test-type;--no-sandbox;--ignore-certificate-errors;
                   --disable-popup-blocking;--disable-default-apps;--disable-extensions-file-access-check;
                   --incognito;--disable-infobars,--disable-gpu"""

  preferences {
      download {
          prompt_for_download: false
          default_directory: "$TEMPDIR"
       }
  }

Congratulations!! We are able to configure various Chrome Options in Serenity.